Crazy Heart

Last week, I caught a showing of Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart.  I had high expectations for this film, and I was not disappointed in any way.  The acting was fantastic, the music was solid, and the story was affecting and engrossing, while avoiding the maudlin clichés of similar movies.

The acting is the highlight of Crazy Heart.  Looking like a cross between Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings, Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) swaggers, staggers, and strums through the American Southwest.  He is a self-destructive, hard luck country singer on the downhill slope of a once successful career.  Bridges’s pitch-perfect performance anchors the movie, but his supporting cast is just as strong.  As Bad’s love interest, Jean, Maggie Gyllenhaal offers another fine performance in a critically acclaimed career.  Robert Duvall’s turn as Wayne, Bad’s friend and bartender in Houston, is a minor, but important, part, and the performance is exactly what you would expect from Duvall.  In an unpublicized role, Colin Farrell portrays Tommy Sweet, Bad’s protegé who has rocketed to superstardom while his mentor plays in bowling alleys and dive bars. Farrell once again shows his talent, which is too often underappreciated and overlooked.  Both Bridges and Farrell did their own singing for the movie and the soundtrack, and they are convincing as performers.  I don’t know whether they did their own guitar playing, but Bridges (I didn’t pay as close attention to Farrell’s musical performance) is a convincing guitarist.  Even on the lead guitar breaks, his hands move like they would need to, if he was actually playing.

Monday Links

We’re light on news this morning, but hopefully, the posts in the pipeline will go up in the next day or two.

• I’m sure a lot of people get tired of hearing about the generation of American authors who came of age in the mid-twentieth century.  Roth, Updike, Vonnegut, Bellow, etc. have been praised (and criticized) to the point that there’s little new to say.  Still, those authors produced some of my favorite works of fiction, and I’ll read just about any article about them.  Mark Lawson takes a look at that generation and the Americans writers who have followed in a preview of his upcoming BBC radio series, Capturing America, which covers the same subject.
• Inspired by The Hurt Locker’s nomination for Best Picture, A.O. Scott explores the (a)political aspects of war films.
• Ben Patashnik interviews Donnie Andrews, one of the real-life inspirations for The Wire’s Omar Little.
• This forthcoming album features an eclectic group of singers backed by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.  With contributions from Tom Waits, Pete Seeger, Steve Earle and a host of others, it looks promising, and the proceeds support a good cause.  You might think about picking it up when it is released next week.

Friday Links

I saw Crazy Heart earlier this week (full review coming).  Do yourself a favor and check it out.  Until you get time to go to the theater, you can peruse these links:

• A while back, I posted about the National Archives buying a significant group of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s papers collected by his private secretary.  It turns out the deal wasn’t as simple as everyone thought.
• This Ohio-centric article warns of proposed budgetary cuts for historic preservation grants administered by the National Park Service.
• Neil Young can’t stop moving.  Earlier this week, he announced he’s working on a new album.
• As if his being a 7-foot tall, albino psychopath wasn’t enough reason to be afraid of Judge Holden, Rachel Bailey lists five more reasons to be scared of the most memorable character from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
• Some folks call Mohsen Namjoo the “Iranian Bob Dylan.”  I can’t speak to that, since I can’t understand a thing he’s singing about, but his music is an interesting blend of western and Iranian folk music.  I can hear the influence of both Dylan and particularly Leonard Cohen.

Pete Seeger’s Banjo Head

Last week, Pete Seeger put his old banjo head up for auction on eBay in an effort to raise money for disaster relief in Haiti.  Now, he has closed the auction and is going to donate the head to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Following discussions with his family, the famous folk singer has ended the auction, plans to find other ways to funnel donations to the nonprofit Green Belt Movement organization, and plans to donate the famous banjo head — which reads “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It To Surrender” to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which already has one of his banjos in its collection.

The banjo head, which is akin to a drum head, could have fetched $35,000 on eBay.

“The family decided,” Seeger told the Journal Monday during a telephone interview, “we don’t want to make money out of selling something like this.”

I thought it was a great idea when they announced the auction.  I particularly liked what the money would have gone toward.  Rather than simple disaster relief, the proceeds would have funded the Green Belt Movement, which works against deforestation and soil erosion – problems that have plagued Haiti for decades.  I don’t understand the Seeger family’s reluctance to auction the head.  It is exactly the kind of thing that you expect Pete Seeger to do.  By selling a small section of animal hide, he could raise a lot of money for an environmental and humanitarian cause.  Now that the family stepped in, though, the head will sit in a display case in Cleveland not doing any good for anyone.   I love museums, but some things are more important.  Plus, explaining why the head is not in the museum would do more to help people understand Pete Seeger’s career than seeing the head itself.

Monday Links

• In the wake of outpouring of support for Haiti, Nicholas Kristof calls for more attention to be paid and support given to the Congo.  Since 1998, the civil war in the Congo has resulted in well over 5 million deaths and the rapes of countless women and girls of all ages.
• J.D. Salinger’s death has inspired all manner of articles about him and his work.  One of the more interesting pieces details how the deal to publish “Hapworth 16, 1924″ turned sour.
• Eric Dexheimer reports on banned books in Texas prisons and how those policies affect inmates. (via Mark Athitakis).
• In a six-part series, Scott Timberg takes a look at the time Philip K. Dick spent in southern California.  Although still weird and still troubled, some say that Dick was less weird and less troubled in those years.  The first three segments have already appeared.  Despite not being familiar with Dick’s work beyond a couple of film adaptations, I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.
• Lee Rourke explores the joy of building your own bookshelves.

Friday Links

At this rate, every writer you know will be dead by the end of the year:

• Several high profile objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have been damaged in recent years.  This article gives an inside look at the process of restoring one of them, Tullio Lombardo’s Renaissance-era statue of Adam.
• You remember the post-9/11 anthrax attacks?  You know, those the FBI said they solved in 2008.  Well, it turns out that they were wrong.
• T-Bone Burnett has played with Bob Dylan, produced records by a who’s who of rock and Americana musicians, and won a truckload of Grammys.  He talks to Andrew Dansby about it.
• This column by Ed Koch unintentionally sums up everything that is wrong with the crowds at many high-priced concerts.
• The U.S. Air Force filmed a response to Dr. Strangelove but never showed it.  Now, you can view it here.

J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010

J.D. Salinger died yesterday at age 91.  From the time I discovered The Catcher in the Rye in my middle school library until shortly after high school, it was my favorite novel and Salinger one of my favorite writers.  I’m sure I read it the first time because I thought I wasn’t supposed to (it’s something of a miracle that it was even in my middle school library).  Growing up in a family that valued reading and the free exchange of ideas, I knew that The Catcher in the Rye was frequently banned, even if I didn’t know precisely what it was about.  I soon learned, and I loved every bit of it.  I probably read it once a year until I graduated high school, and for one class, I even wrote a talkin’ blues about it as a book project.

Eventually, I found more to like in Salinger’s short stories about the Glass family.  They were quirky and tragic where Holden Caulfield was only embittered.   “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” from Nine Stories is probably the best of the Glass stories, and it remains one of my favorite pieces of short fiction.  And, of course, Salinger has to get some credit for creating the family that inspired Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.

Declassifying the Cultural Revolution

The Chinese government is slowly releasing records from the era of the Cultural Revolution.

The files of the Cultural Revolution, which raged from 1966 until Mao’s death in 1976, make up a mere 16 of the 21,568 volumes that the Beijing Municipal Archives has made public in four separate releases — in 1996, 1997, 2001 and 2009. (The other files cover periods of Chinese history from 1906.) Stored in thick binders on library-style stacks, they can be viewed in the Municipal Archives building, a spacious, modern structure with overstuffed chairs and a scholarly atmosphere on the south side of the city.

The yellowing files give scant insight into those days’ atrocities: the denunciations of parents by children; the humiliation of intellectuals; the millions of lives ruined by Red Guards ordered to remake society through upheaval. Mao’s personality cult made him a living god, and armed violence broke out over his affections. Everything was politicized. Many committed suicide.

It’s not a lot, but it’s better than nothing. Although the files don’t reveal much about governmental abuses, they do illustrate the mindset of many loyal Chinese.  The linked article includes multiple examples from the recently opened material, documenting the actions of average Chinese citizens.  Political historians may be disappointed with the lack of detail on the actions of the Chinese government, but social and cultural historians have to be thrilled with the new sources.

Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle

I discovered Kurt Vonnegut the summer I graduated from high school.  In short order, I devoured most of his novels and both of the short story collections then available.  Over the past few years, I have reread Cat’s Cradle multiple times, although it wasn’t my favorite the first time through his work.  Looking for something to cleanse my palate after I bottomed out halfway through Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (American Pastoral it ain’t), I returned to Cat’s Cradle once again.

Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut’s fourth novel, explores the intersection of the lives of John, the narrator, and the Hoenikker family.  John first encounters the Hoenikkers while researching a book project on the day the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  Research scientist Felix Hoenikker was the father of both the bomb and three children with whom John’s life becomes intertwined.  As it was supposed to happen, John and the three Hoenikker children end up on the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo.  On the island, John discovers that Felix also created a substance called ice-nine, which turns water into ice with a melting point of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  Intrigued by the potential power of ice-nine, “Papa” Monzano, the president of San Lorenzo, has welcomed the Hoenikker’s and given the oldest son a position in his government.

The Confederate Memorial at Arlington

Historians Edward Sebesta and James Loewen have written an open letter to President Obama urging him to forgo the annual presidential wreath placement at the Confederate memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.  Signed by nearly fifty professors, including some of the most respected Civil War historians, the  letter presents a detailed history of the monument and the ideology of those who erected it.  The whole letter is worth reading, but here is the money quote:

Sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Memorial Monument enhances the prestige of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization with a long history of racism from praising the Ku Klux Klan in the early part of the 20th century, to publishing articles against the Civil Rights movement in the Civil Rights Era, to promoting neo-Confederacy today. When the president of the United States of America enhances the prestige of this monument and of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, he strengthens a group working to set back America’s progress in race relations.